Tag: Gaming

Ben McGrath has a long and fascinating profile of Sasha Hostyn, aka Scarlett, “the most accomplished woman in the young history of electronic sports,” namely Starcraft II:

Some context from McGrath:

“It’s not a sport,” John Skipper, the president of ESPN and, by extension, the emperor of contemporary sports, has declared, referring to gaming in general. “It’s a competition.” He added, “Mostly, I’m interested in doing real sports.”

That “mostly” was an acknowledgment that the network has nonetheless begun hedging its bet against a cyber-athlete insurgency. In July, ESPN2 aired a half-hour program previewing an annual tournament for a game called Defense of the Ancients 2, or Dota 2, thereby enraging football and basketball fans who would have preferred round-the-clock speculation about off-season roster moves, and who vented on Twitter: “None of these people are anywhere near athletic,” “Wtf man. This is our society now,” “WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING ON ESPN2?,” and so on. Meanwhile, the winners of the Dota 2 tournament took home a total of five million dollars.

Back to Scarlet, and how her story touches on the themes of gamergate:

[A]s an academic Rob [Scarlet’s father] had been a longtime observer of online communities, with their anonymous sniping and trolling. He was one of the first few hundred people to create an account on the social-networking site Reddit, and still recalled the coarsening of the site’s tone as its user base expanded beyond programmer geeks. “I knew that small communities are pretty good, and big ones get toxic,” he said. … The toxicity of gaming culture, with its adolescent sexuality and its tendency toward misogyny, was of particular relevance in Scarlett’s case. Shortly after she turned pro, word got out on the Internet that she was a transgender woman.

(She won’t discuss the subject with journalists, as she feels that it has no bearing on her role in gaming.) That was in early April of 2012, about a year after she began playing the game casually, and about a month after a controversy arose in a coarser corner of the e-sports world, when a prominent Street Fighter personality named Aris Bakhtanians was asked by a Twitch employee, Jared Rea, whether the fighting-game community’s habits of using vulgar and, in some cases, hostile language toward women could be tamped down. As Rea put it, “Can I get my Street Fighter without sexual harassment?”

Bakhtanians replied, “You can’t, because they’re one and the same thing. This is a community that’s, you know, fifteen or twenty years old, and the sexual harassment is part of a culture, and if you remove that from the fighting-game community it’s not the fighting-game community—it’s StarCraft.” …

In the rush to discover more about this new sensation, a few people noticed that the previous fall she’d entered—and won, easily—a couple of Iron Lady events, women-only tournaments organized online by the Electronic Sports League. No fair, some argued, apparently believing that StarCraft players, like sprinters, should be segregated by degrees of testosterone. The tournaments’ director, pHaRSiDE, wasn’t buying it. “Transgender girls have been competing in Iron Lady since the start of the tournament series,” he wrote. “No one seemed to care until Scarlett started winning. So it’s kinda funny how people only want to ban transgender girls who are incredibly good.”

Another note on the swift descent of ethical journalism. One concern I’ve repeatedly voiced is that at some point, corporations will simply dispense with “sponsored content” on existing publications and create newspapers and magazines for themselves. Since the Fourth Estate has already abandoned any pretense of being independent of advertizers for their content, it’s a small jump. And here comes Verizon with a new website:

The most-valuable, second-richest telecommunications company in the world is bankrolling a technology news site called SugarString.com. The publication, which is now hiring its first full-time editors and reporters, is meant to rival major tech websites like Wired and the Verge while bringing in a potentially giant mainstream audience to beat those competitors at their own game.

There’s just one catch: In exchange for the major corporate backing, tech reporters at SugarString are expressly forbidden from writing about American spying or net neutrality around the world, two of the biggest issues in tech and politics today.

The most popular post of the day was A Declaration Of War Against Francis; followed by Does The Self Exist? Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here. You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 24 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here. Dish t-shirts are for sale here, including the new “Know Dope” shirts, which are detailed here. Below are images for the general design and the DC-specific one (also available are ones for Oregon and Alaska – the two other states voting on legalization Tuesday):

The final email for the day comes from a veteran programmer. I’m going to give her the last word on the gamergate furore:

This is regarding your post about gamergate. I have been a very loyal reader of your blog for more than 10 years now and have been a subscriber for two. I have always dearly admired and respected you. I know this email is long and harshly worded in places, but please take the time to read it. It would mean a lot to me.

Your readers were right to warn you about not writing about that debate. At the very least, you should have researched the industry you were covering before making comments about it. Perhaps you did by reading some extremely lazy leftist writing on the subject (of which there is unfortunately much) or because you’ve been hanging out with Breitbart, who seems to be your ideological bedfellow in this – I don’t know.

[Ed. note: Professional details written here are being left out “because my identity will be easy to determine and it may put my life and that of my family in danger (this happened to other women for much less).] Whom I know is not especially important – the industry is so small that anyone who has been there for as long as I have knows all these same people. (Gamergate doesn’t quite see things that way and continues to weave conspiracy theories about it.) What I mean to convey is how personal all this is to me.

I don’t actually want to bring up the ludicrous “both sides have been bullied” quote, considering that only “one side” has received credible death threats that are being investigated by the FBI. [Ed. note: that “both sides” line was clarified in a follow-up post the reader may have missed.] I don’t mean to complain, because much like all of the mature nerdy adults I know, I’m over it, but I have to ask: do you honestly believe that only nerdy white males exist, that nerdy girls don’t get bullied? (I know I was!) I also had to then deal with not being taken seriously as a “fellow gamer” by the “gamer culture” whose end you’re lamenting for some reason (worry not, it will continue to thrive as is).

And you compare it to gay culture, as if there has ever been any actual or remotely comparable discrimination of gamers! Recall all the gamers who were murdered when they were caught holding hands in public while arranging for DS Download Play on their DSes!

Let’s take a moment of silence for the gamers who bought the latest Call of Duty: Modern Warfare only to be brutally beaten the next day for talking fondly about it in school! Let’s remember that time the arch-conservative Jack Thompson was preaching about the harm people who buy games do to society – wait wait, my bad … that was the game industry he was blaming for school shootings and the like. Andrew, forgive me, but you are off your rocker.

On the contrary, the multi-billion industry that is video games have catered to gamers to such a degree that it’s had some regrettable side effects. For instance, it is not uncommon for game creators to receive death threats for changing a game mechanic (in an effort to improve the experience for their audience)! It’s been happening for some time! Writers have been harassed to the point of quitting the games industry for including an optional homosexual romance in a popular game (Dragon Age 2). The anxiety and the terror I feel that the other shoe could drop at any minute, and that my life or that of my family could be in danger, is very real and has caused me a lot of anguish and stress.

The truth is, this is an audience that is so used to being treated with velvet gloves and getting their way, that manipulating the creators via threats is actually seen by some as a perfectly reasonable way to register a complaint. Short of the awful harassment that George Lucas must have suffered for “ruining childhoods” (not that I disagree he made some poor films), can you imagine any other creative medium with this kind of audience?

The developer who has been the real subject of gamergate for some time created a game about depression that was more an “interactive experience” (not unlike the old text adventure games of the early video games, ironically) and was not seen as a “real game” by those now in the gamergate movement. She was harassed well before her ex-boyfriend tried to ruin her life and career on the internet by airing their dirty laundry with that callous post. Why? Because there are people who don’t want developers to make games they don’t want to play and for them, simply ignoring these developers and their games won’t do. It’s as if Britney Spears fans went on a hateful rampage because they could not live in a world where Mary Timony was producing records, simply because Pitchfork chose to write about Mary’s releases every once in a while.

Let’s talk for a moment about Anita Sarkeesian. I support her work in spite of disagreeing with much of it, because I believe that if video games are ever to be a respected medium, acknowledged for meaningful cultural commentary (which I believe it very much deserves), it needs to have a rich tradition of critique and criticism – whether the critique is something everyone agrees with or not. However, no reasonable discussion can take place when Sarkeesian is being harassed and threatened with sexually violent murder. It so happens that the only video I ever found compelling of the many she has made is this one:

Analysis like yours strokes the hateful mob’s egos and reduces it entirely to what both the far left and Breitbart find intriguing: “a culture war”. Imagine how much progress could have been made about our environment or global warming if it hadn’t become part of the culture war. All this kind of politicizing does is force people to take sides that have no nuance, and I want no part in it. I happen to be a woman developer (already suspect for gamergate) who happens to make quirky games that people in that movement would hate but may refuse to ignore by harassing me (something I’m extremely worried about). Much as I have little respect for the left’s handling of this garbage, they actually stand up for my personal safety! They denounce these jerks when they see them, even if it’s with ridiculous academic language.

From everything I’ve seen, gamergate is an angry mob bent on bullying game creators into making something other than what they want to make. It is an angry mob bent on bullying journalists into voicing opinions other than those they have. They bully not by name-calling, rude words, or insults, but with threats of murder, rape, and school shootings. If your heart was in the right place, as it usually is, you should be condemning these asshole reactionaries. For the first time in my life, you’re talking about an issue that DIRECTLY affects me and my livelihood, and you’ve taken the bullies’ side, Andrew. It absolutely breaks my heart. Why, why, why can’t you call them on their shit?

For the record, this was the second paragraph of my post:

The tactics of harassment, threats of violence, foul misogyny, and stalking have absolutely no legitimate place in any discourse. Having read about what has happened to several women, who have merely dared to exercise their First Amendment rights, I can only say it’s been one of those rare stories that still has the capacity to shock me. I know it isn’t fair to tarnish an entire tendency with this kind of extremism, but the fact that this tactic seemed to be the first thing that some gamergate advocates deployed should send off some red flashing lights as to the culture it is defending.

See you in the morning.

(Photo: Competitors take part in the Tough Mudder London South in Winchester, England on October 25, 2014. The world-famous Tough Mudder is a military-style endurance event over 10-12 mile obstacle course designed to test all-around strength, stamina, teamwork, and mental grit. By Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)

Anita Sarkeesian had a lovely piece in the NYT yesterday, explaining why she is happy that “gamer culture” as it once was is a much diluted phenomenon. Its points are as valid as the foul attacks on her (and so many others) are indefensible in any shape or form. Money quote:

The time for invisible boundaries that guard the “purity” of gaming as a niche subculture is over. The violent macho power fantasy will no longer define what gaming is all about. Those who police the borders of our hobby, the ones who try to shame and threaten women like me into silence, have already lost. The new reality is that video games are maturing, evolving and becoming more diverse.

Those of us who critique the industry are simply saying that games matter. We know games can tell different, broader stories, be quirky and emotional, and give us more ways to win and have fun. As others have recently suggested, the term “gamer” is no longer useful as an identity because games are for everyone.

This is basically an echo of my “let a thousand nerds bloom”. But then you come across some recent tweets of hers:

Not a coincidence it’s always men and boys committing mass shootings. The pattern is connected to ideas of toxic masculinity in our culture.

Reading right along, you realize she’s actually not that interested in letting a thousand nerds bloom. She’s interested in suppressing a certain subculture because of her contention that it leads to violence, rape and murder. That subculture is what she regards as “toxic masculinity”:

Since so many seem confused. Masculinity ≠ male. Masculinity is a socially constructed and performed gender identity: http://t.co/JpPQd6zwkg

Watching the news about a school shooting today in Seattle and honestly I’m sorta shaking with fear and with rage. — Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) October 24, 2014

Her op-ed is, I’d say, in this broader context, a little disingenuous. In one version of her argument, gamer culture is simply dying out as it is supplanted and complemented by a new diversity. On the other hand:

Women are being driven out, they’re being driven offline; this isn’t just in gaming, this is happening across the board online, especially with women who participate in or work in male-dominated industries.

So which is it: women are being drummed out of games and male-dominated industries (on Democracy Now)? Or are they so triumphant that even her mom is playing games now? In the NYT, she’s proclaiming a great, diverse future for games and gamers; in her Twitter feed, she clearly wants to see this very male subculture “addressed” as a matter of urgency.

I’m not pointing this out to defend the gamergaters. After reading all your emails, and diving further into the virtual vortex of madness that has come to define this eruption, I’ve been convinced I’ve been a little too even-handed in sympathizing with the plight of the angry white nerd. I can’t see a world in which their version of gamer culture is truly under threat. But Sarkeesian clearly wishes it were:

Underlying this belief in the importance of changing other people’s subculture is an argument. For Sarkeesian, it seems that all differences between men and women, or between masculine or feminine identities, are entirely a function of culture, and can only be understood within a paradigm of patriarchy. All I can say is that I disagree. Of course culture matters a lot – but it doesn’t go all the way down. To deny the power of testosterone, or the stark difference it makes in all species on planet earth, can therefore lead you to misread what can and cannot be changed. My view is that there are certain aspects of testosterone that will always make men and male culture different: it’s gonna be inherently more aggressive, more physical, and more sexual in an objectifying way, and more promiscuous. The task of a mature society is not to abolish this difference (which is impossible), but to harness it to more constructive ends.

And so , in advanced Western cultures, we divert male physical aggression and in-group loyalty away from militias and gang warfare toward the spectacle of the NFL or professional wrestling or recreational hunting; we create a culture of sports that can channel a lot of what men want to do in peaceful and socially integrative ways; we allow safe spaces for this kind of culture to exist – and that includes things like violent video games and objectifying porn. And we attempt to offer a model of masculinity that can coopt the pride and ego of a testosteroned will to power into something more gentle. We praise good fathers and diligent husbands.

What a mature society does not seek to do is expunge human nature itself. All such projects backfire, or result in new forms of oppression. And there is a tendency – certainly in Sarkeesian’s work – to problematize maleness itself, to seek to expunge it, to remove all differences between the sexes for the sake of justice and fairness. Her defense will be that she is not attacking men as such – just a “toxic culture of masculinity.” And yet her prose often slips into generalizations that would never be tolerated if used against another group; and it’s hard to see what characteristics of maleness she believes are innate or at least unchangeable.

What worries me in this new era of “checking your privilege” is that men may be punished merely for being men. When liberals actually defend the conviction of the innocent in a murky world of “affirmative consent” pour décourager les autres, you see exactly where this can lead. And my concern is not just that it will not work, but that it may well provoke a backlash that compounds the problem. And that backlash, in turn, will only encourage well-intentioned people to double down on the project.

A little moderation can go a long way. And a little realism even further. Leave Kenny McCormick alone.

As The Times’ readership goes mobile, the publication will phase out display ads in favor of native advertising. “Display has real value, but it feels transitional, specifically when you’re talking about a smartphone-centric world. Advertisements are going to have to be in-stream and intrinsically attractive enough to engage readers,” New York Times CEO Mark Thompson said.

It’s worth comparing that to an interview former NYT executive editor Jill Abramson gave only a year or so ago:

In a Q&A with Wired editor in chief Scott Dadich, Abramson expressed reservations about sponsored content. “What I worry about is … leaving confusion in readers’ minds about where the content comes from, and purposefully making advertising look like a news story,” she said. “I think that some of what is being done with native advertising does confuse a little too much.”

Thompson’s euphemism for deceiving readers? Advertising has to be “in-stream.”

As a white straight guy, let me just say: Thank you. And not because “my people” deserve anybody’s pity — as Louis CK points out, it’s a damn good stroke of luck to be born a white straight male, as it spares us from the scourge of racism, homophobia and sexism. And let’s acknowledge that if someone is committing racism, homophobia and sexism, it’s usually a white straight male. Along with most mass shootings, school shootings and acts of domestic terrorism. Most of the Gamergate dudes are straight white males, too.

But here’s a theory I can offer from the safety of anonymity: The gains of social progressivism generally and feminism specifically have had a polarizing effect on straight white male culture.

Some of us — myself included — have adopted extreme caution where it concerns expressing sexuality. Because we want to be polite and respectful and most definitely NOT creepy. Long before Yes Means Yes, social mores guided conscientious straight guys to only reveal sexual attraction when the green light was unambiguous — not easy, considering straight women are masters of subtlety. In the meantime, what we’ve been asked to police is a primordial impulse that lies at the very core of our nature. Our conscious mind knows it’s rude to check out a girl’s butt. Our unconscious mind says, “What is ‘rude?'”

Now listen, this isn’t the History’s Greatest Injustice. I’m just saying that repressing one’s natural impulses is tough. So we’re trying, and we’re not always succeeding. Still it’s a helluva lot better to be a woman now than it was 15 years ago, much less 50 years ago, and at least some of the credit goes to straight guys who are willing themselves to be less aggressive and less lecherous than their father’s generation. But in doing so, we are necessarily changing part of our culture; nobody even says “metrosexual” anymore because it describes most every straight guy in a city of more than 100,000.

Then there’s the straight guys at the other end of the spectrum. They’ve reacted not with introspection but with fear and rage. For them, feminism is an adult form of bullying, and there are all sorts of vocabulary rules… and they’ve retreated to a kind of online cultural ghetto, where none of the rules apply. These guys begin to feel so alienated by society, they can justify not just misogyny but acts of extreme violence against the women they’re attracted to — and all women, for that matter.

Obviously, I’m not saying feminism is at fault. Certainly, the positive effects of the movement far outweigh the negative. But I think we have to acknowledge some areas where it can overreach and call on feminists to communicate to straight men in a more nuanced way, not because we deserve their consideration, necessarily, but because being more inclusive will make their movement less intimidating, less polarizing and much more effective when it comes to achieving their goals of empowerment.

See you in the morning.

(Photo: A Kurdish refugee boy from the Syrian town of Kobani hugs his brother in a camp in the southeastern town of Suruc, Sanliurfa province on October 25, 2014. The Syrian town of Kobani has again seen fierce fighting between Islamic State and Syrian Kurdish forces. Since mid-September, more than 200,000 people from Kobani have fled into Turkey. By Kutluhan Cucel/Getty Images.)

Just a short note because the last sentence in the post is being misunderstood, which is my fault, because I wrote it. Here’s the context:

That piece was not so much “covering the phenomenon” as viciously skewing it. And yes, its tone smacked of bullying and dismissal. When you’re telling people they don’t even deserve to be in a debate, and associate them with segregationists and every other entity good liberals have been taught to despise, “dismissive” is the least of it.

Look: whatever case the gamergate peeps have, they have botched it with their tactics. Those tactics have been repellent in every sense of the word. But bullying has occurred on both sides, and only one side was bullied before.

The two sides I am describing are the journalists whose work I was just criticizing and the gamergate supporters. Not the whole two sides of gamer culture; not men and women; just the journalists I’ve been citing, and the people they’ve been lambasting.

Many readers have warned me not to dip a toe into the gamergate debate, which, so far, we’ve been covering through aggregation and reader-input. And I’m not going to dive headlong into an extremely complex series of events, which have generated huge amounts of intense emotion on all sides, in a gamer culture which Dish readers know far, far better than I. But part of my job is to write and think about burning current web discussions – and add maybe two cents, even as an outsider.

So let me make a few limited points. The tactics of harassment, threats of violence, foul misogyny, and stalking have absolutely no legitimate place in any discourse. Having read about what has happened to several women, who have merely dared to exercise their First Amendment rights, I can only say it’s been one of those rare stories that still has the capacity to shock me. I know it isn’t fair to tarnish an entire tendency with this kind of extremism, but the fact that this tactic seemed to be the first thing that some gamergate advocates deployed should send off some red flashing lights as to the culture it is defending.

Second, there’s a missing piece of logic, so far as I have managed to discern, in the gamergate campaign. The argument seems to be that some feminists are attempting to police or control a hyper-male culture of violence, speed, competition and boobage. And in so far as that might be the case, my sympathies do indeed lie with the gamers. The creeping misandry in a lot of current debates – see “Affirmative Consent” and “Check Your Privilege” – and the easy prejudices that define white and male and young as suspect identities (because sexism!) rightly offend many men (and women).

There’s an atmosphere in which it has somehow become problematic to have a classic white, straight male identity, and a lot that goes with it. I’m not really a part of that general culture – indifferent to boobage, as I am, and bored by violence. But I don’t see why it cannot have a place in the world. I believe in the flourishing of all sorts of cultures and subcultures and have long been repulsed by the nannies and busybodies who want to police them – whether from the social right or the feminist left.

But – and here’s where the logic escapes me – if the core gamers really do dominate the market for these games, why do they think the market will stop catering to them? The great (and not-so-great) thing about markets is that they are indifferent to content as such. If “hardcore gamers” skew 7 -1 male, and if corporations want to make lots of money, then this strain of the culture is hardly under threat. It may be supplemented by lots of other, newer varieties, but it won’t die. Will it be diluted? Almost certainly. Does that feel like an assault for a group of people whose identity is deeply bound up in this culture? Absolutely. Is it something anyone should really do anything about? Nah. Let a thousand variety of nerds and post-nerds bloom. And leave Kenny McCormick alone. This doesn’t have to be zero-sum.

The analogy a reader made this morning between the end of gamer culture and the end of gay culture was really helpful to me. I’ve written and blogged a lot about the end of gay culture; and I’ve always tried to present both sides of the argument. Yes, I wouldn’t trade our freedom for the closeted, marginalized past; at the same time, it’s impossible not to feel some regret at the close-knit, marginalized, very distinctive solidarity gays have lost as a group, and some affection for a world, built defiantly to defend itself against outsiders, that is dissipating before our eyes and on our apps. I’m for integration and against identity politics. But do I miss what, say, leather bars once were – and feel very conflicted now that bachelorette parties come and go as they please in some of them? Do I harbor some traces of resentment at those who treat gay culture as some kind of straight playground, or at the mob of straight folks who will swamp any gay presence at next week’s once-very gay high heel race in Dupont Circle? Guilty as charged.

And look, many gamers were the bullied in high school; this was their safe space; it was a place they could call home. They now feel it slipping away, and it has unhinged some and disconcerted many, as a lot of mainstream culture has heaped scorn and ridicule on them at the same time. And I’m sorry, but I feel some sympathy here. That sympathy has, alas, been swamped by revulsion at the rhetoric and tactics that have come to define this amorphous movement. I haven’t, to continue the analogy, gone stalking bachelorettes or yelling obscenities at them. I just sigh and move on. But these people do have a point; they have long been ostracized and marginalized; their defensiveness exists for a reason; and, in the last couple of months, they have also been the target of truly out-there dismissals and vitriolic abuse – often from other men, and often from those who were not bullied in high school at all.

Am I wrong to detect in this pile-on another round of bullying of these people, of treating them as scum, of dismissing anything they might have to say? Here are Gawker’s Sam Biddle’s tweets last week:

Ultimately #GamerGate is reaffirming what we’ve known to be true for decades: nerds should be constantly shamed and degraded into submission

This was meant ironically, of course – a debating flourish. But the joke only works when you’re re-visiting those high school wars, only to dismiss the losers of them. It was a piece of condescending ridicule, designed to rub the losers’ faces in their own demise, from a prominent perch. Biddle is not alone. Here’s a now-infamous piece by Leigh Alexander:

‘Game culture’ as we know it is kind of embarrassing — it’s not even culture. It’s buying things, spackling over memes and in-jokes repeatedly, and it’s getting mad on the internet.

It’s young men queuing with plush mushroom hats and backpacks and jutting promo poster rolls. Queuing passionately for hours, at events around the world, to see the things that marketers want them to see. To find out whether they should buy things or not. They don’t know how to dress or behave… “Gamer” isn’t just a dated demographic label that most people increasingly prefer not to use. Gamers are over. That’s why they’re so mad.

These obtuse shitslingers, these wailing hyper-consumers, these childish internet-arguers — they are not my audience. They don’t have to be yours. There is no ‘side’ to be on, there is no ‘debate’ to be had.

This last meme – that these people are not even worthy of a hearing – is pretty endemic among the college-educated cool kids running online media operations. Here’s one Kyle Wagner:

What’s made [gamergate] effective, though, is that it’s exploited the same basic loophole in the system that generations of social reactionaries have: the press’s genuine and deep-seated belief that you gotta hear both sides…. Tomorrow’s Lee Atwater will work through sock puppets on IRC. Tomorrow’s Sister Souljah will get shouted down with rape threats. Tomorrow’s Tipper Gore will make an inexplicably popular YouTube video. Tomorrow’s Willie Horton ad will be an image macro, tomorrow’s Borking a doxing, tomorrow’s Moral Majority a loose coalition of DoSers and robo-petitioners and scat-GIF trolls—all of them working feverishly in service of the old idea that nothing should ever really change.

This is Deadspin’s spin on this. It’s pure vitriol, resting on an unspoken, hard left view of culture that is more disturbing because it presents itself as snark and analysis, rather than tired, easy agit-prop. It’s a classic piece that asks all the cool kids today to smear and dismiss all the bullied of yesterday – and give them one last shove into the locker. Gawker’s Joel Johnson actually cites the piece thus:

That piece was not so much “covering the phenomenon” as viciously skewing it. And yes, its tone smacked of bullying and dismissal. When you’re telling people they don’t even deserve to be in a debate, and associate them with segregationists and every other entity good liberals have been taught to despise, “dismissive” is the least of it.

Look: whatever case the gamergate peeps have, they have botched it with their tactics. Those tactics have been repellent in every sense of the word. But bullying has occurred on both sides, and only one side was bullied before.

The two sides I am describing are the journalists whose work I was just criticizing and the gamergate supporters. Not the whole two sides of gamer culture; not men and women; just the journalists I’ve been citing, and the people they’ve been lambasting.

Hey, I’m the guy who wrote the thing that pissed a bunch of women off. In my defense, I didn’t mean to suggest that women CAN’T be nerds, and when I said I tend to be skeptical of the idea, I actually meant it as a compliment. I understand the over-reaction, as the misogynistic argument many people seem to think I’m making (that only men can be nerds and women must be faking) is far too common, and largely a translation of male nerd insecurity. Then again, if they weren’t insecure, they probably wouldn’t be nerds. I tend to assume women are more confident, well adjusted, and psychologically centered – all things nerds lack in the real world, and only claim when we create our own insular ones.

Again, the point is that being a nerd isn’t just about what one likes or even being ostracized for liking it, but about how one reacts to that ostracism. There are many healthy ways of doing this, either by attempting to acclimate to the group or attempting to forge one’s own identity independent of it. Recoiling into your own obsession until it consumes you to the point where you can’t fit into normal society even if you wanted to (i.e. devolving from an enthusiast into a nerd) isn’t one of them. Most of the women I’ve known in my life, even the avid D&D players and Whovians, were better than that. They can divorce their identity from their passions when the need arises. Being a nerd means you can’t.

A few others defend that reader:

It’s a shame to see people so adamantly reject an opportunity to practice some empathy. Not that there should be empathy for people making death threats, but they (the threateners) are enabled by people who might actually have some lived experience that is worth listening to. There is a market for what Gamergate is selling and we should be asking why.

Look, girl nerds didn’t have it great. But I’m going to venture a guess that they weren’t physically abused over it to the extent that boy nerds were.

The stereotypical jokes – pantsings, wedgies, being chased home by the jocks, getting your stuff stolen, all because you didn’t ascribe to a specific identify type – these things were real, Andrew. Boy nerds actually got the shit kicked out of them for what they liked and watched. I remember it decades later.

Does that mean it’s ok to treat Sarkesian the way she’s being treated? It’s a fucking insult to feminism to suggest your reader said it was, not to mention an insult to intellectual honesty and honest discussion.

Here you have a reader who says, “Hey, you know what? Gender roles were a problem for me too. And they really messed up a lot of people like me, and this Gamergate business is an outgrowth of how we were marginalized, and some people see it as a harmful extension – but an extension nonetheless – of the community that formed out of getting beat the fuck up for liking Star Trek.” And how do people respond? By saying that experience isn’t legitimate.

Please. Haven’t we told enough people that their experiences aren’t worthy of being listened to already? I mean, for fuck’s sake.

Another is roughly on the same page:

I think that boy nerdiness vs girl nerdiness comes down to the differences between systemic male and female bullying. Boy bullying starts younger because policing gender roles is so critical to male identity. Many boys, once they identify as nerds, seek to claim the label for their own acceptance and delayed revenge of being ‘smarter’ than the other boys. Looking around they don’t see girls with the same outlook, instead seeing girls who mostly run with groups of other girls and who wouldn’t risk their social capital on an outcast. Boys suffer much cruelty from both genders and physical abuse from other boys at this age.

Girls, meanwhile, act nasty toward each other later. Middle school becomes a grapple for power for girls that simply doesn’t exist in the same way for boys whose roles are much the same as earlier. Girls will take lifelong friends and make them into enemies in middle high. It is at this point that girl nerds become an identity (not that they weren’t nerds before, just that they begin to identify that way). Meanwhile, boy nerds who have put up with this ostracism for long enough, see these girls as trying to invade and claim the identity they have had and have had to live with for years. Plus, constant peer rejection especially from girls has led them to be suspicious of all outsiders as possible turncoats.

Personally, I think the girls have it harder because their rejection is sudden and senseless. But from the boys’ perspective, the girls have always been complicit in their ongoing rejection and, since cold revenge was always their only solace, they take sick delight in the rejections that they can issue.

I say all of this as a man who thought this way many times growing up and who still must stifle his superiority impulses, especially over women. It seems to me, though, that the solution is to remove the bullying of all stripes and at all levels of childhood. Hard work, but if there had not been complicit adults in my childhood persecution, I wonder if it would have been so damaging.

Read the whole discussion on Gamergate and nerdom more generally here.